Last June, my mulberry tree produced more fruit than I knew what to do with. We were picking several pounds every three or four days for almost six weeks. My mom put a limit on how much could come into the house at once. I froze bag after bag. We still had frozen mulberries in December.
This year the tree is even bigger and I expect an even larger harvest. So I have been thinking about this in February, when everything is still dormant and I have time to plan: what do I actually do with a serious mulberry harvest? Here are the three things that worked best last year.
This became a Saturday morning tradition in June. The recipe is simple: add a cup of mulberries to your normal pancake batter, stir gently, and cook as usual. The berries burst slightly in the heat and turn the batter a deep purple-gray color. They are sweeter than blueberry pancakes with a slightly different flavor — earthier, a little more tart.
The full recipe is on the mulberry pancakes page. We made them almost every weekend through June and into July with frozen berries. My little sister now requests them by name.
The most practical use for a huge harvest: freeze them flat on baking sheets, then bag them in one-cup portions. Frozen mulberries go directly into smoothies without thawing. I combine them with banana, yogurt, and a little honey. The result is a deep purple smoothie that tastes genuinely good and has a ton of fruit in it.
The key to freezing is the flat-freeze method: spread berries in a single layer on a baking sheet, freeze until solid (a few hours), then pour into bags. If you freeze them in a pile they stick together in a clump and you cannot portion them out easily.
This was the most ambitious project and the one I am most proud of. I made a simple no-churn mulberry ice cream — whipped cream, sweetened condensed milk, and about two cups of mashed mulberries folded in. Freeze for six hours. The result is a purple-gray ice cream with real berry pieces in it and a flavor that is hard to describe except to say it tastes like what mulberries actually are, which is the point.
The freezer at one point had ice cream, frozen smoothie packs, pancake batter, and still more raw berries. My dad said we had gone too far. I disagree.